Quotes About Decay

Civilization is being poisoned by its own waste products

Like shadowsof the plumbingthat is all that is leftof the great city.

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song. I kiss you and the world begins to fade.

III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.

Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

I command you to leave me at once, for your ideas and phantasies are but the illusions that creep like maggots into civilizations when they begin to decline, and into minds when they begin to decay.

THE CELTIC TWILIGHT by W. B. YEATS Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, ... The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

In the coppice, leaves were quietly and majestically floating earthwards in the pomp of death.

If I didn't have a job, I might have stayed in bed until I rotted.

I hate to say this, but I'll repeat it: After death, all we know that you do is stink.

There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.

when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana.

Jude has a very different character. It is not the cradle of Christianity, or of the assembly on earth: it is its decay and its death here below. It does not keep its first estate.

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Death, is not an end, but a transition crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.

…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.

The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

After his death the gardener does not become a butterfly, intoxicated by the perfumes of the flowers, but a garden worm tasting all the dark, nitrogenous, and spicy delights of the soil.

Corpses are more fit to be thrown out than is dung.

We turn to dust, and all our mightiest works die too.